


comptine d'un autre eté

by hiza-chan (callunavulgari)



Category: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Character Study, Gen, Gender or Sex Swap, Mild Gore, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 15:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3254393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/hiza-chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Will you help me save the realm, Link?” she asks, quietly. The girl nods, and a great weight lifts from Zelda’s breast. She is not alone in this endeavor. Not as long as she has Impa and Link at her side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	comptine d'un autre eté

**Author's Note:**

> This was my entry for the Heroine Big Bang a few years ago. If I remember right, I was doing four big bangs at the time and couldn't complete this one. Earlier today I was going through my google docs and found this. It was meant to stretch all the way until the beginning of Majora's Mask, but I knew that there was no way I'd actually finish it if I tried. So I cleaned it up, added a little until I found a decent stopping point, and voila~ Zelda character study that happens to contain a female Link.
> 
> Title is from a song that I was listening to while doing the cleaning. Translated, it basically means 'a nursery song from another summer.' I thought that it fit.

Palace life as a child was easy if one had the patience for it. Zelda, however, did not. As a child she spent her days learning how to be the perfect little princess. She learned to sew, how to sing, how to ride like a proper lady with both legs on one side of the beast, skirts tickling her ankles. It isn’t that she abhors being a little lady or even that she dislikes the idea of being a princess. She loves the castle’s gardens, the flowers just outside of the castle walls—where she can lay in the grass and daydream, safely within the palace guard’s sights.  
  
She loves her father—his red beard and his booming laugh, how happy he looks with mother tucked tiny and golden haired against his side in the moments when the public eye is not on them.  
  
She has no great love for her mother, but she loves Impa fiercely.  
  
The woman is more than a guard, more than a babysitter—she is the woman who sings Zelda to sleep at night, the first person to tuck a dagger into her tiny hand and say, “There is no shame in being a woman, little princess. But one must learn to defend herself when she is as little as you.”  
  
“But that’s what I have you for,” Zelda whispers, curling her fingers around the hilt of the dagger and marveling at it’s smoothness.  
  
Impa smiles at her, pulling her into a hug. She smells of metal and the glow bright flowers that only grow beneath the light of the moon. “Someday I may not be here to protect you, princess. When that day comes, you must be strong.”  
  
Zelda thinks of what Mother would say if she knew of what Impa was doing—if she would banish the Sheikah woman from the palace or merely frown in disapproval. Father would approve, Zelda thinks.  
  
She curls her hand tighter and nods against the warm skin of Impa’s neck. “I will be strong,” she promises and Impa smiles.  
  
“Good girl.”  
  
.  
  
The war ends when she is still young, Hyrule united under one banner once more. The lines around her father’s mouth ease as does the darkness in his eyes.  
  
Having been kept from most of it, she only knows what the scribes write in the history books. They write lengthy sagas of bravery, of men clad in shadow and creatures more beast than man. She reads the books each night once they’ve penned them down and grumbles when Impa comes to collect her.  
  
With the end of the war comes the man from the east, dark of skin and hair a brighter red than her fathers. He smells of spices and metal. As she watches from her father’s side, he bends at the knee and kisses her father’s sword, swearing an oath of fealty.  
  
It is a chore not to yawn, for it is early still and there are many people that have yet to come forth — more kisses for her father’s sword, more words that matter naught if the men and women do not abide by them.  
  
Zelda is tired, but she is watching when the man’s eyes flash, a sneer curling his lip. After a moment, she fears she may have imagined it, because the rest of the court don’t seem to notice.  
  
She lets the thoughts slip from her mind as the man walks away and tries to ignore the chill that goes down her spine.  
  
.  
  
The dreams don’t come until she is six years old. They frighten her at first, the dark clouds on the horizon and the monsters hidden in shadow. She wakes each night with her sleepwear drenched in sweat, cries for Impa on her lips.  
  
“Hush, my sweet,” Impa tells her, wrapping her up in strong arms and rocking her, humming her lullaby until the images slide from Zelda’s mind like the grease from a cooked boar.  
  
Later, when the dreams do not stop, Impa will ask her about them.  
  
And Zelda will tell her.  
  
She will tell her of the little girl from the forest, the fairy at her side and the great and shining green stone in her hands. She will whisper of the shadows in the grass and the dark clouds on the horizon, clinging to Impa’s waist.  
  
A moment will pass and Impa will drop a kiss to her wet brow and bow her head over Zelda’s. “You must tell no one of this, your Grace,” she will say. “Not even your father.”  
  
Zelda may be little more than seven years old, but she does not have to ask why.  
  
A princess she may be, but the curse of girlhood is upon her. They would believe her a foolish, fancible girl, taken with her daydreams. She would be chastised for wasting time, never to be believed.  
  
.  
  
The dreams come every night and with each dawning day, the man from the east gains more power in her father’s court. He goes from a strange man swearing fealty to a king to a guardian and then to a trusted advisor. Zelda watches the man drink with her father, as they down mulled wine in companionable silence.  
  
Her father does not come to supper as much anymore, and Zelda’s mother is angry and bitter.  
  
Zelda does not talk much to her mother if she can help it.  
  
.  
  
The fairy girl from the forest comes to her when Zelda is nine years old. The girl sneaks past the palace guards in the gardens and when she comes to a stop a mere five feet from Zelda’s back. It is not the crunch of grass beneath her feet that alerts Zelda to the girl’s presence — it is the silence of her little garden, the birds and beasts and insects quiet, as if they themselves are awed by the little forest girl.  
  
Zelda turns and is at once startled by how the girl who stands before her is both so alike and yet so unlike the child from her dreams.  
  
Before, her form was blurred — a flash of golden hair and green clothes — the glow of a fairy.  
  
Now that she is here, Zelda can’t help but be intrigued by how many details have been left out of her dreams — the freckles across the bridge of the girl’s pointed nose, the mud on her boots and clothes, as if she has been crawling about in the grass. Her hair is a shade darker than Zelda’s own, less like the lemon cakes the kitchen serves and more like golden sunlight pooling on flagstones. Her ears are more pointed as well, the lobes perfect and rounded while the tips stretch to a point just above the rim of her floppy hat.  
  
From five feet away, the only thing Zelda can make out of the fairy is the wings and the blue glow, but no matter. There will be time for fascination later, when the realm is saved.  
  
The girl comes closer, footsteps uneasy and for the first time, Zelda notices how exhausted the girl looks. At once, she regrets the fact that she is going to have to send the girl off again without even a warm supper or a place to sleep.  
  
She tells the girl her story with trepidation, her hands shaking at her sides.  
  
“Do you have the stone?” she asks, and it isn’t until the girl produces it that the shaking of her hands subside. At once, she feels relieved—that her dreams have been proven true—yet also strangely disappointed, because now Zelda knows that everything will unfold the way she’s seen it. She can no longer cling to the quiet hope that it was all a nightmare, that she and her father will live happily until she is old enough to be married.  
  
When she asks the girl her name, the girl frowns at her, before pulling a stick from her pack and bending down to start scratching into the dirt. Zelda peers down at her, puzzled, and it’s only as the girl pulls back that she realizes what she’s looking at is writing.  
  
“Link,” she breathes, testing the sound of it on her tongue. The girl merely nods so Zelda tries not to wonder at her silence. If she’d been born mute or just preferred it that way. Perhaps giving herself a voice has proven too cumbersome. Either way, it is none of Zelda’s business, so she smiles and says, “Well then, Link, I have another story to tell you.”  
  
She tells the girl her second tale, of the triforce and the three goddesses. She tells her of what she knows of Ganondorf, about the Spiritual Stones, and when she has exhausted her voice, Zelda takes a deep breath.  
  
“Will you help me save the realm, Link?” she asks, quietly. The girl nods, and a great weight lifts from Zelda’s breast. She is not alone in this endeavor. Not as long as she has Impa and Link.  
  
She calls Impa and sends Link off to collect the stones, her hands clasped all the while.  
  
Link must return in time. She must.  
  
.  
  
Unfortunately for Hyrule, she does not.  
  
.  
  
Zelda is ten when Ganondorf sweeps across Hyrule, driving the once peaceful nation into a realm of darkness and ruin. She is ten and she is frightened, clutching Impa’s waist like some scared little _doll_ —  
   
She hates it, hates her inability to do anything but watch as her father slumps to the floor with a dining knife between his eyes, hates her mother for clutching and simpering at Ganondorf’s booted feet— _please, please, spare me, take the child if you must_ —and most of all she hates the fragility of her dainty princess-like body.  
   
She presses back into Impa, curling her fingers tight into her mare’s mane. The whiteness looks odd between her fingers, and she thinks again of her mother with her sewing needles and her silk and her guts spilling stinking and red all over the pretty marble floor—  
   
Link looks scared. The image she has of the fairy girl is fleeting, just the flash of frightened blue eyes, green cloth, and the glow of a shrieking, terrified fairy. Then she is gone. Behind them and lost to the sounds of the storm and Ganondorf’s laughter. She tosses the Ocarina over her shoulder, listening, and hoping for some sign that it fell into the right hands.  
   
Thunder claps above them, impossibly loud, and for a moment all Zelda can hear is the weeping of the skies. Then Impa’s voice breaks through, harsh to her ears, and she hears the fear in the Sheikah’s voice and the sharp twang of clicks and syllables of someone ready and willing to die. She crouches closer to the horse, ignoring the whiteness of its mane, the heaving of its sides, and the rain slicking cool and wet down her back.  
   
She is cold.  
   
.  
   
Sheik is born when she is eleven, after Zora’s domain has turned to ice in a fit of anger from their new King, before Impa leaves her for good. Zelda is eleven and living in terror, hiding away in her and Impa’s little hut day after day until she can’t seem to stand it anymore.  
   
The cool press of a knife in her hands is comforting and reassuringly familiar.  
  
Zelda is no longer a princess. Never again will she be a child waiting to be wed, a girl yet to be given purpose in life. One day, Link will return. The girl hasn’t failed her. Zelda knows this in her heart, and though it may be a long wait, Zelda is determined to make the most of it. She will not hide away and cower in wait for her hero to return. She will never be her mother.  
  
When Link returns, Zelda will be a warrior. They will smite the evil from her kingdom and after the pig blood is washed from her castle, Zelda will not return to what she was before.  
  
She will still be a warrior.  
  
But when the sun shines down on Hyrule once more, she will also be a queen.


End file.
